


The Utmost of a Man

by Gileonnen



Category: Coriolanus - Shakespeare
Genre: Gen, Gender Role Reversal, Mother Issues, Reckless Children, Sewing Failure, Soldiering Failure, enslavement
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-02 16:24:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2818637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/pseuds/Gileonnen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While Volumnia tries the daughters of Rome in a test of arms against the Volscians, Caius Martius waits for news of the war. (Gender role reversal AU.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Utmost of a Man

**Author's Note:**

  * For [speakmefair](https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/gifts).



The thrice-damned thread had caught on itself again. "Vesta set you afire," snarled Martius, but if Vesta heard his curse, she did not deign to damn the thread a fourth time. He tried to tug both ends of the thread the way his father had shown him, so many years ago, but both ends were equally stuck, and he couldn't force them free.

He sliced through the tangle with a fishknife and threw the cloth to the ground in an inglorious heap, then kicked the heap for good measure. His mother would have to hire someone to edge her garments with purple, if she could ever be spared from the wars long enough to sit in the Senate. 

As Martius dropped himself into his chair again, Menenius Agrippa looked up from his loom with mild reproach in his eyes. His shuttle flitted nimbly between the threads, although his gaze never left Martius. How he managed it, Martius couldn't begin to guess. "Your mother will not appreciate your kicking her best stola, Caius--"

"Fie on my mother and her stola. I declare an absolute war on her stola, and will fight no other enemy until she has returned from the field."

"Then you mean to be a soldier, Caius Martius?" laughed Menenius. "Would you bring the Volsces to heel again with your needle?"

Martius's ears heated at the mockery. He knew full well how his mother had prayed for a daughter. She had told him often enough that she longed for a girl to acquit herself nobly in war--that she had dreamed of her daughter returning to her with wounds upon her breast and an enemy's blood staining her clothes.

Martius's wife Virgilia was a poor substitute for the bloodthirsty daughter of Volumnia's prayers. Both he and Volumnia had marked how Virgilia flinched at tales of gutting the Tarquins, as though idea held no savor for her. He wondered how she fared now upon the field, with her soft heart and her soft hands.

More kindly, Menenius observed, "The work of home is no so different from the work of war. It consists in the rending and mending of fabrics, and even flesh is only a quicker draping-cloth. If it is nobler to repair than to destroy, then the seamster's work is nobler than the soldier's."

Martius said nothing. When Virgilia's son had taken a fall whilst chasing a butterfly, her cheeks had been white as a candidate's stola. _O Jupiter, no blood!_ she had whispered, while her husband had stitched closed the gash in their son's head. The gut thread, at least, hadn't tangled in his hands.

Menenius inclined his head. "Some hands were made to wield a sword, and some a needle. Your mother plies hers, and you must ply your own in turn."

It would have been unworthy to imagine their tools reversed, and so Martius did not imagine it. He only turned the fishknife over and over in his hand. It felt comfortable there, as though it belonged.

Whatever Menenius thought of that ungracious silence, though, he never got a chance to say; a cry of "Father!" from the door drew both of them to their feet.

Young Martius tore through the doorway and flung himself into his father's lap with little care for the knife. "Nurse took me to the top of the Tarpeian Rock! He said he'd throw me off it if I didn't mind him!" he announced, stealing a knob of soft cheese from the bowl on Martius's worktable.

The boy's nurse looked as though he was fighting not to roll his eyes. He set down his market basket and began, "My lord, I--"

An irrepressible grin split Martius's face. "He _will_ throw you off the Rock. He's a Volscian; they hate all Roman children, and they're always searching for a way to murder them."

"They are not! Grandmother wouldn't have brought me a nurse who wanted to murder me, and if he _did_ try, I would get away and tell Grandmother, and then she would stick a sword in his belly." Young Martius slid wriggling from his father's lap to eat his cheese on the floor, still muttering to himself about Volumnia's ever more elaborate revenges on his nurse.

Menenius set his shuttle aside. "What news from the market, Aufidius?"

"Must I always come bearing news?" Aufidius wasn't smiling, though. If part of his ire--even the greater part of it--was meant for his charge, Martius knew well that nothing soured his slave's temper quite like news of a Roman victory. "Very well. I have news, my lord."

For a moment, all Martius could think of was Virgilia's soft hands. _O Jupiter, no blood._ "News of the war?"

Aufidius nodded. "They say that Valeria will have her cognomen. That should please you, at least. When her women abandoned her and the gates were closed behind her, Valeria fought through the city of Corioli all but alone--"

"All but?" Martius cut in. Valeria was Virgilia's closest friend, the woman she loved best in all the world; he could not imagine that his wife had fled like the rest of the jackals.

Aufidius, though, went on as if he hadn't heard. "They say Valeria Coriolana will stand for the Senate, and who would oppose her? She's the hero of Corioli, after all. Rome has thirsted for a new hero since the days of my lady Volumnia's first glory."

"They'll say she was proud. They called Volumnia proud, when she had helped put down the Tarquins and half the city was clamoring for her to stand for the Senate." Menenius folded his hands over his stomach. "If Valeria is half the woman Volumnia was in her prime, though, she'll prove that she can kneel once to the plebeians and then never bend her knee again."

"They need a firmer hand--haven't I said they need a firmer hand? By Jupiter, sometimes I think they need no hand but a Volscian swordswoman's," Martius said. It was something like agreement. "But Aufidius, the point. What news is there of Virgilia? What have you heard of her deeds? Does she even live?"

For a long moment, Aufidius didn't answer. "My lord," he began, as though he thought it would sweeten whatever followed. "My lord, they say in the streets that Virgilia was taken by the Volscians, and that Valeria carved a channel of blood through Corioli to save her. They say worse things, too, my lord. You'd do well to close your ears to them."

"I will not close my ears." Martius observed as he rose to his feet that he still carried the fishknife in his right hand. Upon the floor, young Martius continued his oblivious litany of condemnations. "Tell me what you've heard them say of my wife. I'd rather hear it from a man I trust than from a smirking costermonger whose every other word is 'corn.'"

Aufidius looked down. Martius did not miss that his eyes seemed to glance across the knife's mirror-bright edge on their way to the floor.

He set the knife down on the worktable and heard Aufidius breathe out. "They say that she's a coward at best, and a traitor at worst. They say that if she hadn't married the general's son, she would have been executed on the field. Some say that she should have been. Forgive me, my lord."

"It's not you who should beg for my forgiveness. You're a true and noble friend to me, Aufidius," Martius answered. He clapped a hand on Aufidius's shoulder, less to commend him than to anchor himself while his mind roamed through phantom streets full of whispering plebeians. An iron part of him imagined descending upon them like a hawk upon a dovecote and rending them to ribbons of quivering flesh.

"We'll prepare to greet the soldiers," he said instead. He straightened his spine like a soldier preparing for inspection. "Menenius, my mother must have her laurels. We'll crown Valeria and Virgilia with bays, and shout them into the city as heroes."

"Crown all three of them?" asked Menenius.

If the precipitous fall from the Tarpeian Rock had loomed before him, still Martius could not have imagined wavering. He nodded once. "My wife was in Corioli, so she must be crowned. I'll do her the honor a wife deserves."

"Your mother may do her less honor, with all of Rome watching."

Martius wrapped his pallium around himself and gestured his son and his slave to follow. Aufidius came with a wry smile that might have been mockery as easily as sympathy. For once in his life, young Martius obeyed without a word.

With his forces marshaled behind him, Martius turned to Menenius. If this was what Volumnia felt when she stood at the head of a column and bid her soldiers smash themselves against a city's walls ...

There was no room in him for meditations. "I am Virgilia's husband, and she is the best of my flesh. I can be no other thing than what I am."


End file.
